discussion week 1

Cloud Risks and Challenges

There are some rapid advances in cloud technologies by different cloud service providers and due to these advances consumers, who are using the cloud services are making full advantage of the services and tools in their organization.

But there are some security and access control roles which consumers need to have in place before using public cloud services or private cloud services.

There are few points to cover like security, data and access to the data and how the data is protected and how it can have encrypted or the cloud provider encrypts the data.

Companies have to choose better software or service as per the business requirement to setup a private cloud infrastructure and you need to consider how the data centers are managed.

There are 3 main things while setting up the private cloud

1. Security

2. Access

3. Continuity

Security:

Security is a business necessity for every organization whether it may be private or public cloud.

Advantage of having a private cloud is that we can setup our own security measures which are in house and can be modified as per the organizational need and it makes it less dependent of the service provider which may or may not satisfies our requirement.

Business are always looking for strong security to make sure their data is safe and can be accessible safely by employees.

Access:

One of the good advantages of the cloud is it makes organizational data accessible with an internet connection. That’s the end result but, as an IT professional, there are many steps and considerations to get to that end point successfully.

In traditional data storage model companies would have a locked server rooms and employees have to login from a network computer.

Access can be further restricted with a private cloud since those data centers are provided by cloud providers, but companies has full control on data and security if you chose to use your own security. You can use the cloud provider tools which helps and decreases the use of employees needed while maintaining your own r=private cloud data centers.

Continuity:

The first basic thing of continuity is availability of data 24/7. There is no point of using the cloud services if the service is not available 24/7 and for companies which has larger application’s and keeping their services up and running 24/7 is very high priority.

Consumer has to look at cyber-attacks and in case on disaster attack what can be done and does the cloud providers provide enough solutions and security to overcome these situations.

Good thing is Private clouds have the ability to spread workload over multiple servers, but are limited by the amount of server space a company owns or operated.